Currently if you apply conditional formatting to a named range (i.e.. a range named via the Name Manager or a table style named-range), the value in the "Applies to" column of the Condidtional Formatting Rules Manger will revert the named range to its absolute cell reference.

eg. "Applies to: =Table1[Column3]" becomes "Applies to: =$C$2:$C$7".

Apart from being more difficult to read, it creates other complexities. e.g. if I happen to copy/paste a cell into this range, it creates a mess in the rules manager, creating a new rule for each cell pasted.

e.g. if my named range is 'Table1[Column3]' which corresponds to cells $C$2:$C$7, and I copy say cell C2 and paste it into C8, then in the rules manager another line is for some reason added with the same rule. So now I have one rule for range '$C$2:$C$7' and another one for '$C$9'. Why?!

Having one line for the named range would make things so much more simple.

Currently if you apply conditional formatting to a named range (i.e.. a range named via the Name Manager or a table style named-range), the value in the "Applies to" column of the Condidtional Formatting Rules Manger will revert the named range to its absolute cell reference.

eg. "Applies to: =Table1[Column3]" becomes "Applies to: =$C$2:$C$7".

Apart from being more difficult to read, it creates other complexities. e.g. if I happen to copy/paste a cell into this range, it creates a mess in the rules manager, creating a new rule for each cell pasted.

Thanks to Graham for starting this conversation. If you would also like Excel to maintain named range references and structured table references in the “applies to” field for Conditional Formatting rules, please add your comments and vote this one up. We will prioritize accordingly.

All of the other office applications support this function. Hold down CTRL and + and you get subscript, hold down CTRL, Shift and + you get superscript. While not too many people know this, for those of us in the chemical fields, these shortcuts are indispensable. Excel already supports the basics of bold, italic, etc. Please expand it to include these.

Thanks to Jeffrey for suggesting the shortcut keys to format text as subscript or superscript. I can see that this would be useful and consistent with the other applications. As with all the requests, voting helps move the request up in our priority list, so keep the votes coming if this is important to you.

So that we can easily manage conditional formatting. While we're at it, the way conditional formatting is treated when cutting / copying and pasting etc could be reconsidered.

[Following examples added by Dan [MS] for clarity on 10/20/2015]
* name rules
* add a comment to rules
* more easily see what rules apply to what range
* see which rules can be consolidated b/c they are similar
* etc.

Thanks for the suggestion Levi! We’ll be taking a look at this along with some other asks around conditional formatting. It’s a big help to see the things with the most votes, particularly within areas like formatting. So please keep the votes coming for things you want us to do sooner!

As of 2013, it conditional formatting formula editing is still inconsistent with the regular application, and makes it harder for users to learn conditional formatting, which is one of the more abstract concepts of the early Excel learning process.

Arrow keys are still modifying formulas rather than moving the cursor, for example.

Great suggestion, thanks David! And thanks to other people who took the time to clarify/comment on this one. There’s definitely room to tighten this experience up in a number of places. We’re getting a lot of traffic on the site, so please keep voting for the things you care about most to help us do a great job of prioritizing.

It has been documented for a long time that the Center Across functionality is much better to use in place of Merge & Center. Most people don't even know the functionality exists because it is buried.in a dialog box

I propose creating a button for it and moving it to the Home tab. There is even a place for it right under the Merge & Center button. I think having it on the Home tab with go a long way in getting people to create more user-friendly spreadsheet in the workplace :)

I teach excel, and it feels like around 90% of students (daily Excel users) don't know the clear all function exists. Also when someone press the delete key, 90% of the time, they mean to press clear all, they just don't know it exists, so they then remove the fill, change the colour, delete borders, unmerge cells etc, These all take many clicks.

I truly believe that MOST Excel users waste time every day because they don't know of the existence of "Clear all". Excel should make this really obvious by 1. Adding a keyboard shortcut (Shift + Delete maybe?) 2. Adding it to the right click menu!

I teach excel, and it feels like around 90% of students (daily Excel users) don't know the clear all function exists. Also when someone press the delete key, 90% of the time, they mean to press clear all, they just don't know it exists, so they then remove the fill, change the colour, delete borders, unmerge cells etc, These all take many clicks.

I truly believe that MOST Excel users waste time every day because they don't know of the existence of "Clear all". Excel should make this really obvious by 1. Adding a keyboard shortcut (Shift + Delete maybe?)…

The font size of the list items within a Data Validation list is often too small to read. If you can't add a feature to allow the user to choose the font size of the list, then perhaps you could do one of the following:

1) Set the font type (Arial, Calibri, etc.) and size equal to the size of the Normal font

When a filter is applied in a header row, the filtered column(s) gets a "Funnel" icon to indicate that it has been filtered. In a row where multiple filters have been applied, if, in addition to having the funnel icon, the "filtered" icons came in a different colour - say a limited choice of colours for the user to pick from - then that would make the filtered columns easier to spot. For a user looking for the first time at a file and wanting to find what columns have been filtered, having the "filtered" icons in a different colour from the rest of the "drop-down" like icons that are attached to the header row would enable the user to more easily spot the filtered columns. Just saying.

When a filter is applied in a header row, the filtered column(s) gets a "Funnel" icon to indicate that it has been filtered. In a row where multiple filters have been applied, if, in addition to having the funnel icon, the "filtered" icons came in a different colour - say a limited choice of colours for the user to pick from - then that would make the filtered columns easier to spot. For a user looking for the first time at a file and wanting to find what columns have been filtered, having the "filtered" icons in a different colour…

There is (somewhat hidden) support for engineering notation as a number format (ie: the pre-defined custom number format "##0.0E+0"), but it would be extremely useful to take this a step further and allow for number formatting with SI prefixes. For example, the value 12E3 would display as "12k", 34E6 would display as "34M", 56e-3 as "56m", 78e-6 as "78μ", and so on.

In the options of the conditional formatting, you can select arrows. The red arrow goes down and the green arrow goes up. Is it possible to have the color in the other way round red goes up and green goes down ?

I have formatted my spreadsheet with some cells having thick line borders, some having thin line, dotted lines, etc. I now want to change the color of ALL borders in a selection. I would like to be able to select an area, then choose "change border color" and select a color from the selector. All existing borders would then be changed to that color.

It's very common to express a decimal as percentage points.
For example Growth last year was 10%. This year is 15%. The change is 5 percentage points, but saying growth increased by 5% would be confusing (5% increase of 10% is 10.5%)
It would be nice to able to format the value to appear as 5 without having to multiply the true decimal value by 100. Alternatively if I could get the effect of using a "%" sign in the number formatting string without having "%" appear in the cell, that would work as well.

It would be good to be able to lock or protect the formatting of cells (including columns, rows and ranges) so that the format is preserved by default when data is pasted in.
Also, this could be used to prevent Styles from overriding customised formatting of sheets and charts.
This doesn't have to be password protected - just a safeguard against accidental changes.

When you have merged cells on top and then unmerged cells below (merged cells will be a header for January and unmerged cells would be data points like Salary / Budget / Available) you are unable to add / remove / hide specific columns, if you select the Salary column and click hide / insert or delete excel will delete the 3 columns since they are merged together. This bug was not present in earlier verions of excel.